Category: Uncategorized

Our Fight, by Ronda Rousey

“This book is not about how sometimes the greatest challenges are blessings in disguise. This book is about how sometimes in life everything you have worked for comes crashing down and the only way forward is to rebuild it into something better.” – pg. vii

“I was perfect. Until I wasn’t.” – pg. 10

“Even if you know you are the best in the world, you must be aware that someone is out there trying to take that away from you.” – pg. 48

“When you have trained your entire life for something, […] you feel an overwhelming sense of calm despite your pounding heart.” – pg. 77

“Times like this is what the show is for, to showcase and repackage people going through crisis.” – Lorne Michaels on SNL, pg. 90

“I wasn’t fighting to win; I was fighting not to lose.” – pg. 106

“Losing set me on a path to happiness. It forced me to step back, to reassess and reprioritize.” – pg. 115

“No matter what I had achieved, it was never enough. I dangled the promise of ‘this will be the thing that makes it all worthwhile’ in front of myself like a carrot but instead of ever finding happiness, I only felt more and more unfulfilled. […] There was never going to come a point, no matter how incredible the achievement, where I could say, ‘OK, I did it!’ and just be content in the afterglow forever. I needed to be happy with who I am and the life I had. Not the things I did.” – pg. 264

“We are much more than the tiny boxes that we put ourselves in. […] So much more than the labels we feel forced to use to identify who we are. We are so much more than our jobs. So much more than our worst days. Than our best days. Than any single moment.” – pg. 269

“The present was everything I wanted to be. And it was finally enough.” – pg. 270

“It’s impossible to get everything you ever want in life, but trying is the best part anyway.” – pg. 270

The Woman in Me, by Britney Spears

“I was unknown, and I had nothing to lose if I messed up. There is so much freedom in being anonymous.” – pg. 54

“I like the work. I like the practicing. That has more authenticity and value than anything else.” – pg. 124

“You have to test your boundaries, to find out who you are, how you want to live.” – pg. 186

“In order to be creative, you have to have room for play in your schedule.” – pg. 208

“I have a lot of soul-searching to do. It’s going to be a process. I’m already enjoying it.” – pg. 265

“Freedom means that I get to be as beautifully imperfect as everyone else.” – pg. 174

Last Words, by George Carlin

“[My mom] passed on to me the love of language, an immense respect for words and their power.” – pg. 9

“[I had] the eternal dilemma of longing to belong, but not liking to belong.” – pg. 140

“I wasn’t using my mind to produce external evidence of my inner state.” – pg. 140

“Some day you will release what you have down inside of you and it will be listened to and heard. […] Insist on being yourself. Don’t let anyone change you or silence you.” – Mary Carlin, pg. 144

“I was stumbling across the difference between being an entertainer and being an artist.” – pg. 146

“I’m going to be the person on the outside that I’ve been on the inside my whole life.” – pg. 152

“I’ve always liked the idea of having a shelf for my stuff. Tangible proofs of the things I’ve done.” – pg. 158

“As long as you have observations to make, […] you will always have material. People have always asked me: ‘Don’t you ever think you might run out of ideas? Don’t you ever worry about not having anything to say anymore?’ Occasionally that does flash through your mind, because it’s a natural human impulse to think in terms of beginnings and endings. The truth is, I can’t run out of ideas – not as long as I keep getting new information and I keep processing it.” – pg. 161

“It’s still one of my favorite pieces, if for no other reason than the grief it caused people who deserve to have grief caused to them.” – pg. 162, about Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television

“I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.” – pg. 164

“I hate to behave in clichés.” – pg. 220

“The noisier the culture becomes, the stronger your voice has to be.” – pg. 236

“The boilerplate definition of satire is taking on the mentality of your enemy […] and taking it to extremes in an ingenious way.” – pg. 261

“Things have a way of telling me when they want to be done.” – pg. 263

“I sort things out well. I place things in my world where they ought to be mentally as well as physically. In fact I move my physical world around in order for my mental world to be a little easier to look at and work with.” – pg. 272

“The creation of material is the ultimate freedom.” – pg. 280

Will, by Will Smith

“Some of the most impactful lessons I’ve ever received, I’ve had to learn in spite of myself.” – pg. ix

“Comedy is an extension of intelligence. It’s hard to be really funny if you’re not really smart.” – pg. 20

“It’s impossible to be unhappy when you’re grateful.” – pg. 42

“Being good at something allows you to be calm in a storm.” – pg. 69

“Advice at its best is one person’s limited perspective of the infinite possibilities before you.” – pg. 99

“Living is the journey from not knowing to knowing. […] Life is learning.” – pg. 114

“I would drop the mic, but I need it for the next chapter.” – pg. 134

“Choosing the city you live in is as important as choosing your life partner.” – pg. 149

“It’s respectable to lose to the universe. It’s a tragedy to lose to yourself.” – pg. 159

“The universe is not logical, it’s magical.” – pg. 177

“Things are always impossible, right up until they’re not!” – Quincy Jones, pg. 182

“Don’t block your blessings.” – Gigi, pg. 183

“Whats true about movies is also true about life: You tell me what you want, and I’ll tell you who you are.” – pg. 212

“There are only two human problems: (1) knowing what you want, but not knowing how to get it; and (2) not knowing what you want.” – Stephen Covey, pg. 213

“We knew what we were looking for. Now, we just had to go find it and convince whoever had it to give it to us.” – pg. 215

“If quitting is an option, you’ll never finish anything hard. The only way an imperfect mind can be forced to achieve is by removing all of its other options.” – pg. 237

“The human mind is a storytelling machine. […] From the beginning of time, humans have used character and story to make sense of the mystery of life. We need our lives to mean something.” – pg. 269

“To place the responsibility for your happiness on anybody other than yourself is a recipe for misery.” – pg. 357

“One of the central and most critical tenets of filmmaking is ‘know your ending.’ When you understand the emotional, philosophical, and moral conclusion of your movie, you can better craft everything that leads up to it.” – pg. 401

“If I die, I’m not even gonna know. So the real question is, how do I want to live?” – pg. 412

Rebel Rising, by Rebel Wilson

“I decided to work hard to be excellent.” – pg. 86

“I wanted my life to mean something, but I didn’t know what that was.” – pg. 103

“Sometimes you need to take a huge step away from your situation to see it clearly.” – pg. 118

“If you’re not confident in yourself, then how can someone else be?” – Josh Lawson, pg. 162

“When I asked [Ruth Cracknell] if she got nervous to perform, she said that each thing she’d done in her career was like a brick and as the years pile up, so do the bricks.” – pg. 237

Double Fan Apps… and uh, More.

I haven’t blogged in a very long time. I just opened my random Word document of potential topics to talk about in said blog. And now for my greatest trick of all, I will attempt to mold them together into some form of cohesiveness: therefore allowing me to start anew and reclaim my entitlement to blogging. In the next post. After you read all the drivel I had saved up.

In preparation for the new season of The Rehearsal, I was watching (at the time, pre-“Miracle Over the Mojave”) the season prior in case I needed to be up to speed for any callbacks. In one episode, there’s a trivia woman who blogs under the alias, “Cheap Chick in the City.” Nathan mentions how she hadn’t posted anything in over a year, which felt a little personal to me as a fall-off blogger myself. I think I fear exactly what Nathan outed this woman out for… Like people will judge me and think, “Ope! Kelsey hasn’t blogged in a while, she must not be as motivated as she used to be.” When really my only purpose for blogging is just to prove to myself that I continue to exist and that I’m still capable of self-reflection.

I also believe typing out my thoughts sharpens my ability to call upon four syllable words when I need them in my everyday life. For example, a couple months ago my downstairs neighbor was hitting her ceiling (my floor) with a broom, because apparently I walk too heavily on my feet: a sentiment I came to learn when she wrote me a Christmas card that explained how upset she was. Anyways, we had to back-and-forth a bit with the leasing office on the matter. And in an email I wrote, “If they are so CONTEMPTUOUS about living underneath me then maybe they should move to another unit.” No less than 3 days later, I found myself using the same word in a work conversation! The keyboard giveth and taketh.

But most of all, I like to blog because at the end I get to choose a meme that goes with the post – which in turn gets promoted on my Instagram Story and allots me credibility in the internet humor department.

I suppose I can’t relate to my downstairs neighbor because, in college, my roommate Pavlovian trained me to fall asleep and wake up according to the on/off setting on her desk fan. So contrastingly, I am unable to hear anything going on in my neighboring units when it’s time to settle in for bedtime. In order to be comfortable, I must have a wind turbine fan on HIGH and a white noise machine blasting simultaneously. And if I sleep away from home where there are no fan systems, I have to keep the Fan App open directly next to my head. The only advantage to this learned behavior is that – when Pavlov and I were both bridesmaids in our other college roommates’ wedding – we stayed together in the Air BnB and said “Double fan apps!” in the tone of Stepbrothers‘ “Good Housekeeping!” which is a core memory of happiness for me to this day.

[Deletes from the Word document: a couple paragraphs about fast food habits I had in college, plus mourning the Onion Bagel which is no longer offered at Dunkin’ Donuts.] We are now down to two pages left of topics.

[Skips over mention of movies I used to rent from the video store with my mom as a kid: one of which included Rockadoodle – which was basically Space Jam, but about a chicken that played music.] Make it one page.

I can’t seem to find regular rolls of Bounty paper towels at Target. They’re all ‘mega rolls’ that are ‘3 rolls in 1’. One time I accidentally bought those, and the rolls wouldn’t even fit on my paper towel holder. WHY do toilet paper and paper towels companies always have to be like “Ultra is 8 rolls in 2, but Mega 12 rolls in 4!” It’s like, how did we stray so far from the standardized paper towel roll size? I don’t know what any of this stuff is equal to anymore, and I’m scared.

[Lacks a smooth transition.]

I despise Free Stuff Piles. And I especially despise the people who create them – leaving a note and acting like it’s some noble deed they’re doing. No one needs your printer. We all print things at work. And you’re only putting it in a box with other random junk because it doesn’t fit down our trash chute and you’re too lazy to dispose of it properly. Not to mention, the box is a Sketchers Memory Foam shoe box, which you also didn’t want to break down or put in recycling. And now it’s sitting on that $30 Essentials by Target end table – the same one you couldn’t manage to sell on Facebook Marketplace.

Despite my above-mentioned complaints, I’m actually very non-confrontational. When it comes to fight or flight, I’ve always been a flight girly. And I don’t think that’s cowardly as much as it is less effort. I always think about how, if I found myself in a Walking Dead or Batman-type plot, I’d probably just flee the city. You can’t tell me that you wouldn’t move out of Gotham if there’s THREE movies about the terrorism happening there. I don’t care if Christian Bale is hot, the rent is probably high and my apartment is probably going to get blown up. I’m gone after Batman Begins.

But sometimes I exhibit fight tendencies! I recently told someone at work that if one of our colleagues sends me an ‘Invitation to Connect’ on LinkedIn but has never talked to me in person, I neither accept or deny the request and instead let it marinate. The response I got was, “So you’re holding them hostage…” and I thought that was a pretty cool way of putting it.

Future entries coming soon to a phone screen near you.

All Things Aside, by Iliza Shlesinger

“I don’t have the patience to be someone else.” – pg. 56

“As much as we all feel the weight of the world is on our shoulders and everyone is waiting for our reaction, it isn’t and they aren’t.” – pg. 217

“You are the only one in charge of how you are going to feel; no one else really cares.” – pg. 222

“I don’t think anyone is ever fully formed.” – pg. 229

“Our lives happen here, in the details.” – pg. 240